Google and others tried a similar thing with buses.The Locals howled and picketed.The City Government pontificated and demanded money for using publicly funded (through tax dollars) bus stops.Google, et al, did this to provide bus transportation in the Bay Area for their employees because the infrastructure does exist to deliver their employees from their homes in the suburbs to the urban office.

Agreed. But then all these Internet Addicts would have to actually SIT NEXT TO SOMEONE!!! Eeeew! The KOOTIES!!!!

Public transport is the answer, but the entitled class confused nature of the California Ideology squanders forward movement for the sake of narcissism. The collateral damage is massive. Example: the asshole renting a 2 BR apt at 19th and Valencia for $10,500 a month. That comes out to about $350 a day. Someone who has that kind of dosh isn't going to want to spend time rubbing shoulders with someone who pays $1000 a month to share a flat in the Sunset. It just isn't going to happen. They're both fucking peasants (one is an extremely well paid peasant) but the well paid peasant thinks he's something special. Besides, every racist knows poor people have kooties.

It takes me 20-30 minutes to get to work by car depending on traffic. It takes an hour, with 2 changes to get there by public transit. I sometimes have to work late hours without warning - if I'm too late for the last shuttle from my workplace, I'm stuck with a $50 taxi ride.

I work at a national lab. With overhead I cost the taxpayers something like $150/hour. Would you prefer I spend an extra hour a day working or sitting on a crowded bus? I pay taxes that help support public transportation, it just doesn

Well, slap a yellow light on the top and it might be able to provide a much, much cheaper taxi ride.

This would also be great for car-share programs.

If the costs get pushed down, and they're being built as commodity devices and not model-of-the-year, then it might even make sense to go the next step and operate them as public transit. They deliver you to your destination, and then instead of driving in a circle like a bus, they drive to spread out to be available for the next person. There is no reason for p

You take your children to work? Everyone does a major grocery shop during their lunch break? By "freedom" do you mean the freedom to sit in stationary traffic for an hour a day, breaking in all that lovely PM2.5, or something else?

Public transport is not designed to meet all your needs, just the needs of a lot of people making similar journeys while largely unencumbered.

Sounds like you are referring to 'mass transit' ie: commuter trains. Not 'public transit' ie: busses

Public transit is routinely used for ferrying children and groceries. In fact, in many municipalities, that is its majority use. Additionally, there is a significant stigma associated with its usage in many areas. I haven't used it personally since I was a teenager in Denver, but judging by those whom I see waiting at bus stops, the patterns haven't changed much in 30 years. People who cannot afford cars

are you kidding, California is nearly bankrupt. Absurd "green" laws have made the state's resources (which could be used in a "green" way with known engineering solutions) to be increasingly off-limits and that has precipitated a slow-motion economic collapse.

Even a state teetering on bankruptcy can fund boondoggles by issuing bonds payable in the far future. California is in the process of building a bullet train from SF to LA, that is budgeted at nearly $100 BILLION, and take 30 years to complete. On average, these big ticket projects run over budget by a factor of three, so it they will likely burn through $300 billion or more before it is completed, or cancelled. That will be about $10 million per seat. The projected cost of a ticket on the train is far

I like public transportation to some degree, but self-driving cars are WAY more useful.

They could really get anyone from anywhere, to anywhere. With public transport you might have to arrange a few transfers, defiantly have to figure out how to get to a pickup location. And it may not go very close to where you want to go.

But a self-driving car solves all those issues. If you think longer term, you could even have self-driving public transports that took a group of people going to roughly the same place to where they wanted to go with a few stops along the way.

So getting self driving cars working helps public transport as much as private transport...

I live in a small city of around 10,000. In my lifetime, I have seen virtually all of the commercial business move from the city to just outside of it. There are big box stores with parking lots with more area than the stores. Just by eliminating the parking lots, it would save half of the area needed. By timing things well, one could even have the products be unloaded from the trucks to the self driving cars and totally eliminate the need for the stores. One could totally use all of the space in a sto

No, you have to stay in your bubble and swear at those human drivers and check yahoo email with android phone to get ahead in your insane work schedule designed to keep other people unemployed so they can lower your salary. With public transport you might have conversations with real people and those usually lead to some truth. Stay in your bubble.

I mean, the short list? Off the top of my head this solves problems like:

- Public transit only becomes economically viable above certain volumes. Anyone in too small an area doesn't have access to it and never will.- Sometimes public transit doesn't run where you want it to go, especially if you need to make an unusual trip.- Sometimes people need to go places at times when public transit isn't running, or need to go faster than public transit will allow.- Some people are disabled, and would have a hard time getting to the nearest public transit stop even in an area that supports it.

There are lots of reasons why this is a useful solution. So many people in my city (Boston) keep a car that they use about once a week for odd or off-hours trips. A solution like this would take all those cars off the side of the road and replace them with about 1/20th the number of shared cars.

Conventional public transportation has lots of problems that all are well known and most of it comes down to the simple fact that mass transport needs masses and while some part of your route may coincide with enough other people (especially in rush hours of densely populated areas) but most probably not all of it.

The driverless cars actually could be the foundation of a new generation of public transport: you could think of these bubble-cars as the atoms of a peronalised public transport.

Why can't these bubble cars be the public transportation option? I.e. public transportation does not have to mean mass/joint transit. Rather than predefined stops that people get on and off at at fixed times, these cars could be made available to the public at any time of day to get them where they need to go with zero stops along the way. Just pay the fare like you would a bus or taxi ride. It would be nice if you could call a service from your mobile, send your GPS location, and have them automaticall

Because even when public transportation is good, it still takes longer to get places. I saw a survey of drivers in LA once. Something like 70% of the people surveyed wanted improved public transportation........so that other people would take the train and the roads would be cleared for them.

Because even when public transportation is good, it still takes longer to get places.

That isn't good public transport. Good public transport is faster than driving yourself once you factor in time wasted in traffic and looking for a parking space, and costs far less. The problem in the US is that you really don't have any good examples so you think it must always suck. Decades of building cities to be unsuited to public transport doesn't help either. Try living in Japan or any number of western European cities for a while.

My commute in my car is 10 minutes. By bus it would be 40 minutes plus a 5 minute walk, often in the rain. That is an extra hour and ten minutes a day if I rode the bus. I used to work in the suburbs. I missed a bus one night. It took me over three hours to do what would be a 30 minute drive. Another time I needed to go to a suburb on a Sunday. It would have been a 35 minute drive but it was a 2 hour bus trip. Buses run infrequently to keep riders per bus up and make it look good but they also waste a lot o

Public transit is slow. It takes me two to three times longer to get anywhere via public transit than to drive there... and I live in the downtown core of a major Canadian city.

Why is it slow? Because on either end of the journey, I have to walk to/from the public transit stop, then I have to spend time waiting for the bus/train to arrive, then it stops frequently on the way to my destination, and I also possibly have to wait for transfers between busses/trains... The trains come infrequently (only three tr

don't u see that these cars ARE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION?they're not MASS TRANSIT, but they would awesomely form the backbone of next gen public transportation.Tens of thousands of these guys can be on the road, using minimal fuel, picking up people and dropping them off for a fare.you could make larger versions for main routes, but small ones would suffice for most uses.they will support at least 2x density on the roads bc they will tail each other super close...maybe they can even link up to each other at ti

Because it's awful, that's why. I can either drive myself in 30 minutes, or sit my butt on a series of 3 buses for an hour and a half, and that doesn't count the time walking to or from the first bus stop. Sometimes it's hot out, so I'd get to the office all sweaty. Sometimes it's cold out, so I'd be cold waiting at the bus stop. Getting in my own car and driving is just so far and away a better solution. That's why.

The solution is not to convince everyone that riding public transportation isn't actual

Google actually does support public transportation. They're paying some $6.8 million to fund a San Francisco public transit program, for example.

Honestly, the big problem with public transportation isn't companies like Google. It's racism and classism. Here's a good article [slate.com] describing how racism has crippled Atlanta's public transportation and exacerbated the effects of this winter's snow storm, for example.

For popular journeys, mass transit is going to be considerably more efficient.

Not true. Most public transit is not particularly efficient. Trains and buses are very efficient when they are full, but they often run partly empty. On average, they are about as efficient as two people in an average car. An efficient self-driving on-demand electric car is probably better, both economically and environmentally, and they will be more widely used because they are more convenient. Eventually, self-driving taxis will kill public transit. There will no longer be enough demand.

This is the future of public transit for people who insist on transportation freedom. It will be like an electric magic carpet. Instead of whistling out the window, and stepping onto the magic carpet as it flies up to the door, you just enter your destination on your phone/tablet, and the electric bubble drives over from the neighborhood underground automated parking.

According to this page [wikipedia.org] the average number of bus passengers in the UK is 9, and buses get about 6 MPG. So that is 54 passenger-miles per gallon, which is about as good as one person in an electric car, or two people in a gasoline powered car. But even that overstates the case for buses, since they drive a fixed non-optimal route, where a car goes directly to the passenger's destination, so the "miles" are not equivalent.

According to this page [wikipedia.org] the average number of bus passengers in the UK is 9, and buses get about 6 MPG. So that is 54 passenger-miles per gallon, which is about as good as one person in an electric car, or two people in a gasoline powered car. But even that overstates the case for buses, since they drive a fixed non-optimal route, where a car goes directly to the passenger's destination, so the "miles" are not equivalent.

So... us "bitter clingers [go.com]" with our icky big families in our minivans have that beat by a country mile:)

Think about all the traffic jams that exist in busy cities, and how much less congestion there would be with an organised public transport system where each passenger takes a fraction of the space.

A swarm of electric bubble cars could also prevent those traffic jams by using traffic-aware re-routing. That is really easy for computers, but humans are better at following known routes. Humans wait until they're stuck in traffic and then it too late to change the route. Computer cars with good sensors can also drive much faster when packed tight, by accelerating in unison. Humans add 1-2 seconds of delay for each car in a line that has to start moving.

All government services are based on "theft" of resources from people who don't use that government service. This includes the roads that private cars drive on, which are funded in part by gasoline taxes but mostly through non-user-pays revenue streams such as income taxes.

All government services are based on "theft" of resources from people who don't use that government service. This includes the roads that private cars drive on, which are funded in part by gasoline taxes but mostly through non-user-pays revenue streams such as income taxes.

Which "non-users" would those be? Even among those who do not own a motor vehicle, how many of them buy no products or services or otherwise engage in the modern economy; or rely on no public services like fire depts, ambulances, police,

That's kind of the point - government services are (should be) to the benefit of society as a whole, and since we all live together in society, we all reap the benefits even when it isn't immediately obvious. People without children may complain their taxes fund schools - but those schools allow them to live in a society where even the poor are educated enough to have decent prospects (instead of falling to desperation and crime), where employers can expect a decently educated workforce, etc. Even if you're

Are you sure you replied to the right post? Because the one I'm seeing above yours says "when you have the same trip that so many people take everyday". You're from a small town? Congrats, you get to take your car everywhere. That's the way it is, even in the countries that have the best public transport. I'm all in favor of elaborate public transport networks, even if they run at a slight loss and governments have to chip in. I believe governments often recover the cost in "externalities"(*) such as decrea

Betteridge's law of headlines says no and the summary pretty much nails it.

The bubble shape maximizes the amount of internal volume given an amount of materials, or minimizes the amount of materials needed to make a car with a given volume. Take a bubble and attach crumple zones front and back and you have the shape of a typical car. I suppose the idea is that these self-driving cars won't need crumple zones. We'll see about that...

Well, if you add aerodynamics to the equation, the bubble suddenly isn't that favorable anymore. And then there's stability and, as you already brought up, safety.

That said, I fully agree that the only sensible answer in "no". Striking similarities? What striking similarities? Google's car looks much more like a Smart than like Mayer's concept, and Smarts have been around (and copied) since 1998, 13 years before Mayer made her "bubble car" sketch. Slow news day?

I suppose the idea is that these self-driving cars won't need crumple zones. We'll see about that...

Indeed. In fact her statement "when it runs into something, it doesn't hurt that much" is oddly ignorant: your vehicle running into something is part of the issue, but something running into you is the other part. You do not want to be in a "tiny bubble" when a truck or SUV or bus hits you.

You do not want to be in a "tiny bubble" when a
truck or SUV or bus hits you.

How curiously short-sighted of you. The "you do not want to be in a 'tiny bubble' when a truck or SUV or bus hits you" is a statistically insignificant period of time spent in a state of unhappiness. The vast majority of time aside from that, novbody cares.

This type of design seems to be news only to Americans. You could call the current Smart car the descendent in spirit of those early cars due to its profile and 2 seater layout. In fact I believe there are even electric Smarts for sale now and unlike Googles car which look like something designed by a 5 year old girl, they don't look too bad.

Lots of little shared-use autonomous pod cars running around? That's a PRT, a Personal Rapid Transit [wikipedia.org] system. The idea has been around for decades, and a few prototype vehicles have been built. Older designs were rail based. Later designs used guideways, but the vehicle had some steering smarts. The latest designs steer themselves, but still use dedicated roads. Nothing much has been deployed, except for a few small systems at airports and fairs.

Nope, no one has ever thought of light weight cars that have collision safety concerns ever. It is revolutionary, considering the Paradox car with one big door and was designed to fling passengers as far as possible in a collision.

Sounds to me more like 'little rolling coffins'. Why not make them bio-degradable as well so when something screws up and a dozen people get killed, you don't even have to bother prying them out of the damned things, you just dig a hole in the ground and drop them in? Honestly, am I the only one who thinks that getting into a box on wheels that you have NO direct control over is a bad idea? At least with trains and buses there's someone at the controls, even if it's otherwise automatic, who can override the

You have two choices when answering this question - assume you know best and go with gut instinct, or look at the statistics and make an informed decision. The statistics show that your gut instinct is wrong - humans are not made to be drivers, as our "sensor package" was designed to run around jungles being scared of movement in bushes, not to control a heavy machine travelling at decent speeds.

Listen, buddy (and everyone else who is taking the opposing viewpoint, here), it comes down to CHOICE: Why are you advocating giving up yours and everyone else's CHOICES? Why are you advocating not having the CHOICE to control the vehicle you're riding in? Why are you CHOOSING to give up that control to someone you've never met and will never meet? What it comes right down to, is: I don't believe you for a minute. I think you THINK this is right and you THINK you'd be OK with it, but you're wrong, you would

You're making an assumption that it will ever be allowed to 'become the norm' at all, which I and many others believe will never happen. I'll ask you the same question I asked to someone else who commented: Why do you want to give up your ability to choose, and more to the point, where do you get off thinking it's OK to take away MY or anyone else's ability to choose? How do you feel about it when someone else takes away YOUR choices? Do you really think that's right?

If you can keep your self-driven car from hitting anything else, fine. You can't.

I've proven year after year that I'm a competent driver that doesn't cause accidents (which debunks your 'dog' analogy), yet, again, you're mroe than happy to take away MY choices just to satisfy YOUR desires. You sound like a jerk that just doesn't like dogs, regardless of whether or not they're behaving themselves. Good thing that people like you don't get to decide for everyone else, you're obviously the exact wrong sort of person to be allowed that sort of responsibility. Your 'dream' will NEVER become

Presently people think one has to drive all the way or ride public transport all the way. That is why the solutions are unsatisfactory to most people. Trains are incredibly efficient in carrying payload, they are very good for longer distances without stopping. A gallon of fuel for some 450 ton-mile of pay load. The additional cost of carrying both the passenger and his/her battery car/motor cycle is not too much.

I think we need to have stations where you drive your electric vehicle into the station and it gets linked in a line to a tugboat device that pulls it into the city. Then you are separated and can go park your vehicle. The battery you need is only to go from station to destination.The tugboats could run on dedicated roads. The tugboat could even charge you through the link.

The SMART is hugely popular and has been so for over a decade. In europe they are one of the most common cars seen on the roads. It's the bullshit that the USA forced on it that makes it a failure in the usa. The SMART is safer than most cars made in the USA, but they had to add a lot of useless safety crap to meet US regs designed to stifle importation. Europe and Canadian safety regs are good, but US regs are designed to stifle importation of cheap cars.

Then they did stupid shit like not importing the Diesel model that get's well over 60mpg. it sells rapidly in Canada, but you cant buy on in the USA. Maybe if the US regulations would allow a real SMART here the ones that sell for $7800 NEW in Europe they would sell like freaking hotcakes as they would be the most affordable car sold and have a market that is huge.

Instead we have only a handful of dealers so anyone that buys one has to have it serviced 150-400 miles away. They choose to not buy one because Mercedes is stupid and will not let the cars be serviced at a standard Mercedes dealership.

Lastly, they took so long to get it here, they got stomped on by toyota. the iQ is all the car the smart is with a dealer network to get it fixed all over the place. Plus it has a huge advantage of being built in the USA so they can side step all the roadblocks that were in front of the SMART. But the iQ is overpriced at $17,000. It's a $9,000 car and the morons at Toyota refuse to sell it as such. Instead they pile all kinds of extra crap in it to try and justify it's sky high price tag. Same problem as the Smart. Overpriced because the executives are too stupid to know how to price a tiny commuter car so that it sells like hotcakes.

I don't understand why anyone would want one of those little SMART cars with their horrible gas mileage. They only get around 35 mpg. A 300 horsepower Ford Mustang gets around 30 mpg. That's ridiculous when you think about it.

If you want a truly "green" car that gets good mileage, wait until the Elio starts rolling off the line (next year?). 84 mpg in a $7000 American made two seater.

... The other bubble car - Mercedes Smart is a failure in every sense of the word.

For a failure it is doing remarkably well. Here in Europe it has now been for sale for more than a decade, and there are no signs that its market is collapsing.
It's true that not everyone is driving it, but if that is the benchmark, nowadays all cars are failures.

And the Google bubble car will be as popular as Segway.

The Segway also doesn't look like it will go away in the near future, it has found a few niches (e.g. getting around fast in large buildings such as airports and shopping malls, and guided tours for tourists).

To be fair, Yahoo was already in trouble before Marissa took over. She was tasked with a turnaround. Sometimes companies fail to 'turn around' for no reason other than they no longer offer much value to the market that isn't served elsewhere already. Carly, on the other hand..